【明報專訊】It is now only two weeks away from Chinese New Year, and Christmas decorations in shopping malls are giving way to bright red ones that in Chinese tradition symbolise good fortune. While Hong Kong people are busy buying things and making preparations against Spring Festival, mainlanders who are away from home have started returning to their hometowns to be reunited with their families.

The Spring Festival travel season, commonly known as the chunyun (春運) period, is an extremely high traffic load round Chinese New Year. Lasting about forty days, it usually begins on the sixteenth day of the twelfth lunar month.

This year, chunyun officially started on January 19. However, people began to try to get hold of train tickets on January 9. To prevent chaos and deter scalping, the authorities have made it a rule that each is allowed to get at most five tickets. At Shanghai South Station, a tent 2,500 square metres in area has been set up to cover ticket booths. The authorities have said it has been set up to protect people queuing up for tickets from rain and snow. It happened in the past that as many as 8,000 people may queue for tickets in a single day. Therefore, the authorities have prepared about 6,000 seats.

The railways bear the brunt of chunyun. Buses and planes are also heavily relied on. Railways play an increasingly important role in transportation on the mainland. Under China's 12th Five-Year Plan (「十二五規劃」), the construction of a new railway, now named the New Silk Road, will begin in 2011. It would lie across China and stretch to Thailand and Laos (老撾). About ten new railways will soon come into operation. One of them is the Shanghai-Beijing Rail (京滬高鐵), which would shorten the travelling time between the two cities to four hours. Another is the Guangzhou-Shenzhen Rail (廣深高鐵), which has long been under debate.